Purpose: Punctuation is traditionally seen to represent grammatical structures in writing, but some authors argue that it can also reflect the intonation and pauses of speech. In two experiments, we examined the influence of grammar and prosody on adults' judgments of comma placement. Method: University students rated the appropriateness of commas…

Revision of a paper presented at meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (Minneapolis, Minn., April 1968).

Investigated patterns and strength of connections between English dative verbs and the double-object dative argument structure in native-speaker production. Subjects completed three written production tasks using dative and other verbs from different semantic classes of verbs. Results show alternating dative verbs varied in patterns of connection…

To determine the variety of syntactic patterns that potential English teachers would normally use and the possible differences in their oral and written discourse, 1000-word oral and written language samples were collected from 21 student teachers. These samples were divided into T-units and classified according to 23 sentence patterns based on…

This investigation was concerned with five questions: (1) To what degree to children in grade 5 use the same words in speaking and writing? (2) Do they use similar sentence structure in speaking and writing? (3) Do they maintain the same quality of expression in speaking and writing? (4) Is there a difference in the language performance of boys…

To determine the principal differences in syntactic structure between spoken and written American English, a corpus of the spoken (800 sentences) and written (280 sentences) utterances of six graduate students was described in terms of a transformational generative grammar. These utterances were used as a basis for a two-part grammar: (1) a source…

This issue is devoted to first language acquisition. It includes twelve papers concerning: the acquisition of liquids ("1" and "r"); creative errors in the written syntax of deaf children; theoretical and methodological problems in the acquisition of phonology, illustrated from Greek and English: the basis of articulation; the philosophy of…